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> It always amazes me how the discussion can go so quickly go from "The mighty market solves all problems!" to, "The market is an incredibly fragile flower, and

by imgabe 7y ago

> It always amazes me how the discussion can go so quickly go from "The mighty market solves all problems!" to, "The market is an incredibly fragile flower, and the slightest worker protections will result in mass unemployment and starvation!" The market will continue to function just fine. It is just that the outcome of manipulating it is usually not what the manipulators intended. Suppose I thought that Instacart workers were all lovely people who deserved to be millionaires. So, I'll make a law requiring that every Instacart worker be paid one million dollars a year. Do you think this will create my intended outcome? Probably not. The market will continue to function and determine that Instacart is no longer a service that people are willing to pay for, as the cost has become too high. If there is a collective need to provide paid sick time, health insurance or other benefits, then let's collectively provide it for everyone via taxes. The cost will be cheaper the more we spread it out instead of concentrating it all on this company or that company.

marta_morena_23 7y ago
> The cost will be cheaper the more we spread it out instead of concentrating it all on this company or that company. But hey, wait a minute! You are not suggesting that the US should adopt a humane way of treating people instead of holding a carrot in front of 95% of people that they can never reach all under the guise of the American dream, whatever the fuck that is supposed to be?
BuckRogers 7y ago
That’s a possibility. Another is sector wide unionization, rather than worksite as we have in the US. Then one company is never granted that card to cry about.
wpietri 7y ago
I'm all for providing health care (not insurance) via taxes. I think the burden of (mandatory) sick time should fall on the company, because otherwise you create an enormous parallel bureaucracy and require a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that requires a lot more nuance. As to other benefits, it depends, but a lot of those are probably best left in the hands of the company in that they're another form of compensation. E.g., places like Google and Twitter provide staff meals, but I think it makes little sense to have a federal Department of Lunch. Better to leave it to employees and companies to jointly work out locally optimum solutions.
- imgabe 7y ago
  As far as I understand, in other countries that provide, say mandatory maternity/paternity leave, there is a benefit provided by the government that covers at least part of that (not sure about sick leave). Otherwise you kill small businesses. Google can easily afford to cover someone's pay if they are out sick or on parental leave or whatever. A five person shop might not be able to afford to continue paying 20% of their workforce without the work getting done. The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses. There are second and third order effects to things like "just make everyone offer paid sick time" that need to be considered.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    > The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses. I don't necessarily agree with this. To attack this argument from another angle, there are many European countries out there that have a thriving small business economy while also placing a lot more societal burdens on them. In America as we're seeing with the coronavirus, a lot of these small businesses are barely solvent. That's even in spite of us giving them almost no responsibility to their workers, so theoretically the barrier to entry for a small business should be as low as possible. Yet the coronavirus is causing some hefty damage to those smaller businesses because as it turns out, many of them were one crisis away from dying. I don't think the issue has anything to do with the difficulties of starting a small business but rather the difficulties of having to compete with larger companies which have a lot of their costs negated by the economy of scale they operate at.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I think it's a mistake to confuse parental leave and other forms of extended leave with paid sick days. Any small business should be able to handle a worker out sick for a few days. I agree that when we reach the scale of months, that's a cost better addressed collectively.
AlexandrB 7y ago
> It is just that the outcome of manipulating it is usually not what the manipulators intended. Citation needed on the "usually". Regulation sometimes goes wrong, but not "usually". Just look at things we take for granted like 40hr work weeks, no child labor, and health and safety protections for examples.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Look at the industries where those regulations are most relevant and notice how most of the jobs in them have moved to countries where those regulations don't exist. That's not to say we should go back to having children sewing our clothes in sweatshops (oh, we don't have to go back to to it, they still are, just in a different country now), but collectively people have decided that they don't want to pay what it costs to provide those benefits for workers.

by imgabe 7y ago

marta_morena_23 7y ago

> The cost will be cheaper the more we spread it out instead of concentrating it all on this company or that company. But hey, wait a minute! You are not suggesting that the US should adopt a humane way of treating people instead of holding a carrot in front of 95% of people that they can never reach all under the guise of the American dream, whatever the fuck that is supposed to be?

BuckRogers 7y ago

That’s a possibility. Another is sector wide unionization, rather than worksite as we have in the US. Then one company is never granted that card to cry about.

wpietri 7y ago

I'm all for providing health care (not insurance) via taxes. I think the burden of (mandatory) sick time should fall on the company, because otherwise you create an enormous parallel bureaucracy and require a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that requires a lot more nuance. As to other benefits, it depends, but a lot of those are probably best left in the hands of the company in that they're another form of compensation. E.g., places like Google and Twitter provide staff meals, but I think it makes little sense to have a federal Department of Lunch. Better to leave it to employees and companies to jointly work out locally optimum solutions.

imgabe 7y ago
As far as I understand, in other countries that provide, say mandatory maternity/paternity leave, there is a benefit provided by the government that covers at least part of that (not sure about sick leave). Otherwise you kill small businesses. Google can easily afford to cover someone's pay if they are out sick or on parental leave or whatever. A five person shop might not be able to afford to continue paying 20% of their workforce without the work getting done. The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses. There are second and third order effects to things like "just make everyone offer paid sick time" that need to be considered.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  > The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses. I don't necessarily agree with this. To attack this argument from another angle, there are many European countries out there that have a thriving small business economy while also placing a lot more societal burdens on them. In America as we're seeing with the coronavirus, a lot of these small businesses are barely solvent. That's even in spite of us giving them almost no responsibility to their workers, so theoretically the barrier to entry for a small business should be as low as possible. Yet the coronavirus is causing some hefty damage to those smaller businesses because as it turns out, many of them were one crisis away from dying. I don't think the issue has anything to do with the difficulties of starting a small business but rather the difficulties of having to compete with larger companies which have a lot of their costs negated by the economy of scale they operate at.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I think it's a mistake to confuse parental leave and other forms of extended leave with paid sick days. Any small business should be able to handle a worker out sick for a few days. I agree that when we reach the scale of months, that's a cost better addressed collectively.

AlexandrB 7y ago

> It is just that the outcome of manipulating it is usually not what the manipulators intended. Citation needed on the "usually". Regulation sometimes goes wrong, but not "usually". Just look at things we take for granted like 40hr work weeks, no child labor, and health and safety protections for examples.

imgabe 7y ago
Look at the industries where those regulations are most relevant and notice how most of the jobs in them have moved to countries where those regulations don't exist. That's not to say we should go back to having children sewing our clothes in sweatshops (oh, we don't have to go back to to it, they still are, just in a different country now), but collectively people have decided that they don't want to pay what it costs to provide those benefits for workers.